The research will include topics such as safety standards (such as crashtest results) and software security (to ensure that hackers don't take over)

Recognizing that autonomous vehicles are the future of the automotive industry, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) has announced that it is getting ready to create performance standards and regulations for the driverless cars through an extensive research project.

The NHTSA said today that it will partake in a two- to three-year research project that will lead to new rules and regulations for autonomous vehicles. The research will include topics such as safety standards (such as crashtest results) and software security (to ensure that hackers don't take over).

Autonomous cars could prove to be beneficial in terms of reducing congestion and fuel use. They could also assist those who are unable to drive, such as the elderly and those who are blind.

Google is one major technology company that is backing the deployment of autonomous vehicles -- mainly because it has been testing its own driverless vehicles on public roads. The company recently logged 300,000 accident-free miles.

Last month, California Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. signed a bill to create safety standards for autonomous vehicles after taking a cruise in one himself. Senate Bill 1298 by Senator Alex Padilla (D-Pacoima) states that self-driving cars can be used on public roads for testing purposes only as long as there is a licensed operator in the driver's seat.

One major impetus for switching to automated vehicles is traffic capacity. With driver-controlled spacing between vehicles, even with unsafe tailgating, a highway's capacity is limited by the number of lanes and the speed of the cars. With automated vehicles, you can clump them closer together (since braking by the front vehicle can be detected and responded to almost instantly by trailing vehicles). That increases capacity without adding more lanes or increasing speed limits, both of which aren't viable options in many cities.

I think the bigger advantage to having autonomous cars will be that people will no longer need to own a car to get all the benefits from one.

It's much more likely autonomous cars will become a service, not a product you own. Cars are typically used very rarely by people for driving (time driven / total time), they usually are sitting in a parking lot or a garage the vast majority of the time. The biggest advantage in my eyes for autonomous cars is to take cars off the road and free people from the burden of having to own one.

Autonomous cars will also be amazing at solving the 'last mile' problem with public transportation. I can take the train to downtown Chicago, but the train station is still too far to walk to on a daily basis from where I live. A ride from my house to the train station in an autonomous car would be awesome. Then after the car dropped me off, it would go to the next person, etc etc.

I like to drive my car, but most of my 'driving' consists of sitting in soul crushing gridlock, and that I hate.

> With automated vehicles, you can clump them closer together (since braking by the front vehicle can be detected and responded to almost instantly by trailing vehicles).

I think we could quickly take it a step beyond that and couple cars together like a train, getting maximum efficiency. For long hauls like between LA and San Francisco, these clumps could persist for hundreds of miles. There, software isn't as critical, but for shorter distances like a 20 mile commute, you really needs the power of software that knows the destinations of every member for intelligent decisions to be made about when to disengage the vehicle. Individually we're just not capable of acting in concert.

As you write, huge increases in capacity can be realized. In some sections, like bridges, where no one is exiting for at least a few miles, you can eliminate most of the lane spacing as well and add a couple more lanes of traffic.

Not as long as Unions are around look at the Freight train market seems to me that would be the easiest thing to make fully autonomous. The train engineers have time enough to smoke a spliff and tap a button every two minutes I think a computer could do that job better minus the spliff.